This website is the online presence for the Kent Phoenix, a community amateur sports club (CASC) based in Maidstone, Kent.

This website is intended to provide basic ‘brochure’ level information for those looking to take part in our American Football teams or the other activities that we organise, as well as offering structured guidance and support to parents and guardians of children who participate in our activities. It also provides news and up-to-date information regarding current events which we either organise or in which we participate.

Update frequency

The site is updated approximately once a week.

Web site maintenance

This web site is operated and run by volunteers from the Kent Phoenix.

Web site design

This is the second iteration of a web presence for the Kent Phoenix.

Our website was built using the open-source and freely available CMS, WordPress. Although WordPress started as just a blogging system, it has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes built by members of that open source community.

WordPress represents an excellent choice for a CASC website being run on a shoestring because we get fabulous expertise from across the world without any charge at all. Because it is a Content Management system, it also means that the addition of new material can be made by those without masses of technical expertise and without any fears of ‘breaking’ the site.

On top of the WordPress CMS, we laid a front-end design based upon the VW Sports theme by VW Themes which was then further customised. The VW Sports Theme is a responsive theme that adapts to the size of the screen. It was chosen to help ensure the website works reasonably well on a range of devices including smartphones, tablet devices and full-screen computers.

This separation of front-end design from content is good practice in web design in that it enables us to make easy changes to the content or design at a later date without having to worry about too much about its knock-on impact. Isolating content from design makes adding or updating things easy while maintaining the design consistency of the site. Isolating design from content simplifies design changes prevents slight design adjustments becoming a full-fledged redesign.